Bob Dylan Finally Breaks His Silence on the Nobel Prize

Speculation had run rampant when the music legend didn't immediately address the honor, which was announced more than two weeks ago. Organizers even confirmed that Dylan hadn't returned their calls regarding his attendance at the awards ceremony.

But Dylan says he plans to be there when King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden officially hands him the award on Dec. 10. “Absolutely,” Dylan tells the Telegraph. “If it’s at all possible.”

Dylan joins a rarified list of American honorees, and is the first-ever musician to receive the literature prize. “It’s hard to believe,” Dylan adds. Later, he called the prize “amazing, incredible. Whoever dreams about something like that?”

Elsewhere, Dylan takes a philosophical approach to his decades-long career, which has also included 13 Grammys. “Everything worth doing takes time," he says. "You have to write a hundred bad songs before you write one good one. And you have to sacrifice a lot of things that you might not be prepared for. Like it or not, you are in this alone and have to follow your own star.”

Even if that means taking your sweet time in getting back to the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize.

As that silence continued, one member of the Nobel committee went so far as to call Dylan “impolite and arrogant,” but he sounded genuinely thrilled in this world exclusive talk with Edna Gunderson. Dylan spoke to her while on tour in Oklahoma, marveling over an earlier comparison – made by Sara Danius, the academy's permanent secretary – between his work and iconic writers from ancient Greece including Homer.